Nightlord: Shadows (47 page)

Let me think. What else?

No new assassination attempts, so that’s to the good. There was a scrying spell that started watching me, but I poked it with the magical equivalent of a sharp stick. It imploded on itself and went away. Nothing since.

Maybe—just maybe—since I’m minding my own business, other people are minding theirs.

I realize that’s stupid, but it’s a nice idea, isn’t it? Allow me my delusions.

Thursday, May 13
th

It’s been a busy week. Well, I should expect it to be; I’m injecting new life into a long-abandoned, haunted mountain covered in city out in the middle of nowhere. It’s a big project. It needs agriculture, industry, infrastructure, and a whole lot of people. But it also has to be hospitable to life; there’s more to a city than just ways to keep the rain off.

Lights. I never thought I would ever have so much trouble with lights. Coming from a technological society, I just flip a switch. Lights are easy, right? Well… no. Not when we’re talking about public lighting on a city-wide scale.

The city, as a whole, is very close to a circle four miles across. To illuminate this in a way that doesn’t involve hanging another sun in the sky is tricky. But illuminating the outer city isn’t the hard part. The inner city—the various tunnels and caverns and halls inside the mountain; the undercity—that’s tough. See, the surface of the mountain doesn’t compare to the volume. That is, the exterior is all one layer of city. The interior has multiple layers, stacked, all through the mountain and even going down below the nominal ground level. The outer city is over twelve square miles; the inner city is more than four times that!

I’m trying to light up Manhattan.

Twice.

By hand.

Illuminating the subterranean portions of the mountain is a class A-prime headache.

“It’s magic!” I hear you cry. “Just make spells for that!”

Yes, that’s sort of the plan. But here’s why it’s complicated: Magic is another form of energy. It can be used in a very versatile fashion, to either guide, convert, or directly transform into just about any other type. When Tort electro-fried that guy in the street, she did a direct transformation of magical energy into electrical energy. Yes, it was a prepared, pre-charged spell, stored in her staff, but it was still a conversion of magic to electricity.

A typical wizard won’t—or can’t—do that; he doesn’t have the capacity to channel that much raw magical force, and he doesn’t know a highly-refined spell for doing it efficiently. He might prepare such a spell in advance, though. Doing it spontaneously would take a magician’s ability to focus large amounts of magic into a single spell and a very efficient spell in the first place.

I can do that, too, and I do know spells for that sort of transformation, but it seems wasteful. My usual trick is to take existing forms of non-magical energy and use magic as the converter, not as the actual power source. As a result, I spend much less power on my lightning bolts, but it takes me longer to do them—I scrounge up energy from the environment, and that takes time.

Yes, I do sometimes just dump immense amounts of raw power into spells when I’m in a hurry. Guilty. But that doesn’t mean I like doing it. It’s exhausting and makes me hungry. Hungry in a not-good sort of way.

Illuminating hundreds of miles of tunnels is a gargantuan task. It requires no small amount of power, and I just don’t have anything lying around that will work. Oh, I can put a layer of frequency-altering spell along a piece of wall and have it turn, say, infrared into various wavelengths of visible light, but that’s barely a glow, at best. These tunnels are, basically, caves. Warm caves, yes, but the walls aren’t known for radiating excessive heat. Usually, the heat flow is the other way; the warm air has heat flow into the wall, not the other way around.

That fact did gave me cause to think. The place is much warmer than I might expect. We also have hot water and amazing levels of air circulation. All these things take power, so where does it come from? And can I use it to light the place?

So I spent a night communing with the mountain to find out how that works. The mountain is, as I said, alive. Initially, I just dumped a lot of power into it. Later, so did Tamara. This brought it to life, at least temporarily. Eventually, it should have gradually slowed down to the same pace as any other rock—that is, it should have gone back to “sleep” until something charged it up again.

Somehow, while I was in my long slumber, I was inside and in some form of contact with the mountain. I taught it to be a city, but I also taught it how to be alive.

Now, the mountain doesn’t talk, as such. It’s more of an empathic communication. It sends me ideas, images, feelings, concepts. We don’t “talk” in words. So, when it told me that I taught it to be alive, I got a lot of very strange and frightening impressions. When I stopped communing with the mountain, I went down to examine the source of these impressions in more detail.

I kept going down. Then down farther. I left behind the civilized areas and started down a long, slowly-curving tunnel, pausing every hundred yards or so to open another pivot-door. I had the strange feeling that these doors were here for a reason, and were utterly useless. Turns out, I was right.

The tunnel spiraled down until it reached what I can only describe as the heart of the mountain.

Well, maybe I can do a little better than that.

When I started pushing open the final pivot-door, air surged forward around me, whistling through the narrow opening, rising to a roar as it widened. Even so, I felt a wave of heat radiating through the open door like the open door of a furnace. The room beyond was hidden by a wall of stone, but something illuminated the chamber. Between that blocking wall and the door, a narrow balcony ran left and right.

I stepped onto the balcony and felt the heat even more. I peered cautiously around the balcony wall, careful not to touch it. The room was enormous, even—dare I say it?—cavernous. Air roared upward through scores of holes in the floor, each the size of a sewer lid. There was a much larger hole in the center of the room, maybe ten or twelve feet across, holding a black sphere of force.

I swung the door shut behind me. Without that blast of air to cool me, the heat started baking me from all directions. My feet started to complain about the heat. I wrapped myself in a spell to reflect heat and felt much better about being in here. Well, physically more comfortable. Emotionally, I was still on edge and unhappy.

A sphere of blackness hovered in the center of the chamber, half above the floor, half below. The whole ceiling was a wide, giant, inverted cone of rock, peppered with thousands of small holes. It narrowed downward toward a glaring blaze of white light, there in the center of the black sphere. It was a bare pinprick of intolerable brightness, shining white and hot and harsh, glaring more painfully than an electric welder, yet too small even to see the source. The light was a needle driven into the eyes, even through layer after layer of dark globes. It was like nothing I had ever seen before.

Except… except… I think I have
.

It was familiar, as though I dreamed of it… or dreamed it…

Yes. I dreamed this. Now, what is it?

I looked at it carefully, passively examining what looked like my handiwork without ever touching it. Whatever I had done, it represented enormous power, and I didn’t want to accidentally discover that it was also fragile!

It wasn’t fragile. The spells weren’t spells, but enchantments. In my dreams, I constructed these in a style I can only describe as “ruggedized industrial.” When people say “They don’t build ’em like the used to,” well, this is how they used to build ’em when they meant it to last.

Everything else about it was more frightening.

The mountain was alive, all right. It had a heart, it had circulation, it even breathed. It was a living thing on an inhuman scale.

I crept closer to one of the lesser openings in the floor and peered down into the hot rush of air. Yes, as I thought, the room continued below; the floor was merely a divider, running around the distorted torus of the open space in the cavern—a mammoth heat-transfer device, warming air as it rushed up through the holes. This was the central furnace for the mountain.

From below, the floor was a reverse of the ceiling. A giant, cone came up and the point disappeared into the black globe of force, toward that microscopic inferno. Thousands of small holes let air from the outside into the lower room, heated somewhat as it moved through the lower cone, warmed even more through the “floor” of large holes, and heated further in the small holes in the upper cone as it rose rapidly throughout the undercity.

This air and heat circulation was important, but it was just a byproduct of the reaction. Or, I should say,
reactor
.

The spells involved were mostly containment, conversion, and conduction spells. Huge amounts of energy were produced in there, which was a good thing; the conversion spells turned most of it into that vital energy, that vitality, the mountain needed to sustain its mineral life. Not a soul, nothing like that; but energy of movement, of quickening—the stuff that makes you feel alive and energetic, bright-eyed and alert, bushy-tailed and ready to go. That stuff.

Again, that conversion isn’t something wizards can do. Even magicians might not be able to do it; I don’t think they have spells for it. It’s like telling someone to mix their paints to produce a color they can’t even see. They would have to put on special goggles just to see that color.

I can see it, and I can use it. That’s one reason I’m pretty sure I did this.

Anyway, the conversion from electromagnetic to vital energy is also woefully wasteful; it hurt to see just how much energy was wasted. I suspect most of that wastage is because I’ve never sat down and worked with that spell to refine it. It seems to relate to the quantities involved; the more you try to convert at once, the less efficient it is. In tiny amounts, my spell works very well. It just doesn’t scale up worth a damn. Maybe there’s a better way to do it, and I haven’t taken the time to examine the fundamental principles involved.

This thing, on the other hand, represented a workaround and a way to handle the enormous output. Instead of one conversion spell enchantment, there were
hundreds
, all placed concentrically around the reactor spells, absorbing almost everything. What penetrated the first, innermost converter-globe hit the second, and what got past that hit the third, and so on. This vital energy, along with leftover heat, was then transferred into the cones and the floor, moving vitality through the mountain as through a silicate circulatory system.

Even after all those hundreds of layers of absorption and conversion, there was still an enormous amount of energy. The outermost spells acted as a wavelength shifters, moving all the high and low-frequency stuff toward the infrared range, the better to heat the surrounding rock and air—which was a great relief to me; I have no desire to find out what ionizing radiation does to vampire tissue.

Inside the rock, itself, lines of magical conduction spread the heat evenly through the cones and the middle section, including the holes, causing the flow of air to pick up much more heat than it normally would. Which, incidentally, effectively cooled this central region. Without them, the point of reaction would first melt, then boil the stone.

These “leftovers,” after the transformation of electromagnetic energy into vital essence, still produced more than enough heat to act as the central furnace for an entire city.

And the white light? That shining, intolerable pinpoint of light? That was the miniscule remnant, even after all that absorption, conduction, and conversion. That unholy blaze of eye-searing, blinding radiance was the
leakage
. That was the waste product. That was the fraction of a percent of the total output that wasn’t worth the effort to convert into something useful.

In the center of all that energy absorption and conversion, the heart of the mountain, that infinitesimal pinprick of unbearable light… that was a matter breakdown. The spells in there defined a microscopic locus of space smaller than a pinprick, narrower than a hair, narrower than a single cell. Magical walls of force formed channels, allowing only a microscopic stream of superheated air to rise through the central portion.

Think of an almost-blocked funnel, sucking in a stream of air all around the outer edge, narrowing to a point where only the faintest stream of gas might squeeze through. In that miniscule area, everything in any atom, every minute particle, broke down into wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. Direct conversion of matter to energy.

I looked beyond the light and the past the other spells to the heart of the reactor. A single enchantment continuously broke down the fundamental nature of the matter flowing through it. It turned mass into energy. A tiny amount of matter, to be sure, constantly fed into the locus of effect, but it was enough power, properly applied, to burn a hole in the world.

At least now I know how the mountain gets hot water. It could have hot
anything
, if it wanted.

The main reason I know this is my handiwork is because no one else would ever think of matter as sticky energy. It was amazingly simple and beautiful; it was so simple it scared me. If it’s that easy to unzip the fundamental fabric of matter and turn it into energy…

Oh, yes; I can move mountains. With this sort of setup, I can make mountains
fly
. Or disappear in enormous mushroom-shaped clouds.

This spell is dangerous. It’s not like a vitality spell—that’s
my
trick, and only I can do it well. But this was simpler than building a nuclear device back home, without the need for nuclear material. Any physics graduate with a machine shop and materials can build you a nuclear bomb. The hard part is getting the plutonium or uranium. This thing just needed matter. You could use lead, or gold, a bucket of water. It powers a mountain with
air
.